is tongue-tied, we must speak for him too!
If we find ourselves in a free country,
what is the use of freedom,
if we do not speak for the speechless?
Is it a crime to say I am their fellow man?
your tongues are burning, your hunger is raging!
blame the drought! say our Authorities.
But for all those whose voice is silenced,
and who cannot cry help! for themselves: cry help!!
(CB / AT)
Hama Tuma
HAMA TUMA
Just a Nobody
The dead man was no one,
just a man in tattered clothes,
no shoes,
just a coin in his pocket,
no id cards, no bus ticket.
He was a nobody,
dirty and skinny,
a no one, a nobody
who clenched his hand before he died.
When they pried open his fingers,
this nobody,
they found a whole country.
(HT)
Of Guilt
The man ran after his fart
to slap it back
and erase the shame.
The stink lingers.
Today’s love is tepid, almost cold,
won’t dry a hankie,
no heat at all.
Time has subdued my countrymen,
they pass history twice and
leave no shadow behind.
The frog in the pond
laughed itself to death, the owl is blind.
In the Waldiba monastery, forever silent,
noisy festivities are held.
Time moves on grinding all,
changing all,
but the crocodile has no teeth
and the Ethiopian no guilt:
everyone’s heart is lost.
(HT)
MOHAMMED DIB
Translated by Madeleine Campbell
Although Mohammed Dib’s first language is Arabic, he has always written in French. There is no question regarding his command of the language: of Dib’s first volume of poetry, Ombre Gardienne (1961), French surrealist Louis Aragon wrote ‘je ne me trouve point devant une poésie traduite, les mots sont les nôtres, les miens’ (I do not find myself before a translated poetry, the words are ours, they are mine). Yet Dib’s poetry betrays the perennial ambivalence of a transcultural heritage, so that a sense of ‘the other’ permeates his writing. Exiled to France in 1959, drawing deeply on Maghrebi culture and Sufi mysticism, his poetics grew increasingly ascetic and disorientating. His use of impersonal, indeterminate syntax and diction intensifies this sense of dépouillement (denudation). He received the Prix Mallarmé (1998) for L’Enfant-jazz (Jazz child). The poems featured here are from the second of three sections in this collection, which Dib introduced with the remark that poetry is ‘là où regarder s’appelle voir, c’est-à-dire dévisager au fond de soi ce qui est devant soi’ (where to look is to see, or to behold deep within oneself that which stands before us). The prescient indeterminacy of identity, place and agency in these poems heightens the urgent sense that today’s refugee crisis cannot be reduced to the plight of particular ethnic or religious groups, nor to far-off regions, but concerns everyone of us.
Permission for these translations has been graciously granted by the publishers of the French language edition Œuvres complètes de Mohammed Dib, I Poésies © Éditions de la Différence (2007).
Day’s End
They were coming. A day’s
End when everything lingered.
They were coming, you could see
They had walked a long way.
Had abandoned many faces
On the road. A great many.
Do they even know where they are
Said the child. Do they know.
Now he too lingered
At the window. Night fell.
They walked past, even those
Who had lost a face.
The child looked away.
Pulled the window shut. They,
Said he, have gone. He knew.
He found the night inside again.
The same again and most of all
A sparrow flapping its wings.
A sparrow in here? Said he.
In agony here? Said he.
Them
One of them walked past.
Things turned away.
There would be others.
Another walked past.
The trees held hands.
He saw this from the window.
And others came.
Through the glass panes
He merely saw the violence.
Or rather, he merely saw
Their white hair
Cut short at the nape.
Like flat polished stones,
Necks and vile faces, necks
And stares. A stare for a stare.
The Strangers
They came so close. He stole
A glance. Would not forget.
What they wanted from him.
Motionless, they waited.
They exhaled softly.
Shrouding the silence.
DON MEE CHOI
I was born in South Korea during the U.S.-backed military dictatorship. I grew up in a small, traditional house my father bought with his award money for his photographs of the Student Revolution of 19 April 1960 that took place in response to President Rhee’s anti-democratic and dictatorial rule. What my father still remembers about the uprising is that many children, orphaned during the Korean War, gave up their lives because they had nothing more to lose. What I remember are the children, no older than me, who used to come around late afternoons begging for leftovers, even food that had gone sour. The drills at school in preparation against attacks by North Korea kept me anxious at night. I feared separation from my family due to the ever-pending war. I feared what my mother feared – my brother being swept up in protests and getting arrested and tortured. Our radio was turned off at night in case we were suspected of being North Korean sympathizers. At school, former North Korean spies came to give talks on the evil leader of North Korea. I stood at bus stops to see if I could spot any North Korean spies, but all I could spot were American GIs. My friends and I waved to them and called them ‘Hello’s’. In our little courtyard, I skipped rope and played house with my paper dolls amongst big glazed jars of fermented veggies and spicy, pungent pastes. I feared the shadows they cast along the path to the outhouse. Stories of abandoned infant girls always piqued my interest, so I imagined that the abandoned babies might be inside the jars. Whenever I obeyed the shadows, I saw tiny floating arms covered in mould. And whenever it snowed, I made tiny snowmen on top of the covers of the jars. Like rats, children can be happy in darkness. But the biggest darkness of all was the midnight curfew. I didn’t know the curfew was a curfew till my family escaped from it in 1972 and landed in Hong Kong. That’s how big the darkness was.
In 1980, my father filmed the rising waves of student protests against the dictatorship in Seoul. He also witnessed the beginning of the brutal military crackdown on the pro-democratic movement in Kwangju. He believed then that the dictatorship would not end and that it would be too dangerous for us to return home. He sold one of his cameras to pay for my older brother’s surgery, who was injured during his mandatory military service. He gave the South Korean government news footage of a student protest in exchange for the release of my brother from the military and a permit to leave South Korea. He thought then that he was saving us from a life of perpetual darkness. In 1983, my family ‘scattered all over’, as my mother said. My parents and my younger brother headed to West Germany. My sister remained in Hong Kong, my older brother left for Australia, and I went to the US as a foreign student to complete my degrees in art. In light, we all ailed from separation and homesickness. In light, we had to fi
nd a way to settle down, as my mother said. In light, we lived like birds.
GOLAN HAJI
Translated by Stephen Watts
Golan Haji wrote the first notes for ‘A Light in Winter’ at the Grand Palais retrospective of Bill Viola’s work in Paris in Spring 2014. A few months later he reworked them into this poem in half-remembrance of the exhibition and halfway between the dream processes that perhaps video art and poetry share. These distances and ambiguities reflect quite naturally on the complex experiences of mirrored absence: both Viola’s art and Golan’s poem lend themselves to language on the edge of deflection and to the ability to meditate on the nature of ‘exile’ (a word incidentally that Golan Haji is very wary of being pigeonholed into).
I travelled to Paris in February 2016 expressly to co-translate more of his poetry, and ‘A Light in Water’ is one of the results of that happy journey. I’d met Golan at the Al-Sendian (Al-Mallajeh) Festival in Syria in 2010, a beautiful gathering of poets, artists, photographers, children and villagers, and the last of its kind before the appalling years of rupture exploded in 2011. Golan managed to leave Syria in 2011, first for Jordan and then to Paris, where he has lived since. We’ve translated his poems across the intervening years whenever there was an opportunity to snatch time to sit, or walk, together – this shared space being vital because it gives us the scope to directly test and coax the fluency, physicality, verve and edge of Golan’s poetry into something not too dissimilar in English. When it works (and intuitively we feel it sometimes does) then ‘a happy journey’ is perhaps the most appropriate description of this dialogue of translation.
A Light In Water
Bill Viola sequence
(Innumerable Attempts To Reach Eternity)
The simple but impossible method of achieving immortality is to stop breathing, then to stay alive without breath.
The dreamers are sleepers fully dressed under the water. Bubbles are a sign of life as of the body’s decay. We can’t be sure which. They sleep on the stage and their hands don’t move, and the waves delude you into thinking that their fingers stir in weak and final motions.
An illuminated column writhes in deep waters, a young man’s plunge as a comet swallowed by a whirlpool; we were in front of those waters and he didn’t see us standing there, behind us the great conflagration. Bubbles, stars come up from the depths, were merging together, increasing in size as they surfaced towards us. We all are black shadows in this great night, unless the huge fire be damped down. No one will see us as long as such conflagration is behind us and no one will see us if we are inside it.
Did we go far or get close or will we melt soon? We heard the sea’s roar in the desert, our faces were touched by hot air blowing through the windows of the cars we were crammed into. Immaculate brightness dazzled our eyes. Dry waves ascended like transparent tongues above flames beneath a burning sun. So this is a mirage! I love it neither as symbol or metaphor but as a phenomenon. I delight in being deluded by my eyes.
•
(The Painting)
Among the body-parts, after death, the hand is what most resembles its bones.
You are not a documentary film. You are a painting. No events are happening here so don’t expect anything. Inside the painting there is another painting and a faint ray of light passes through that frame to fall on a solitary book whose letters are tiny and wide open as your lungs. The same ray lights the knitting needle inserted by a woman into a skein of wool. A spider’s thread shines on a potted cactus; there’s no escaping fragility, there must be a breeze for you to see such tenderness in a thin thread that summarizes your destiny.
Very slowly the painting moves from screen to screen. The changes are slight. On the first screen the woman who disappeared is sleeping naked, that candles might be lit behind your eyes on another screen. Had you slowed down you would have seen all of this. Don’t rush things. Don’t be the one on whom slowness is forced, don’t be the convalescent or the old man. Slow down exactly when you might be hurrying off. Put on your clothes without haste. Do everything in slowness. Perhaps you will find some sort of solution or hope.
The painting is still hanging on the same wall, and if you stretch your hand out towards the woman asleep inside there, you will see a hand slowly opening its fingers underwater.
•
(The Screens)
Between the two screens there’s a barrier that’s like a threshold between the mirror and the world. On each screen a figure is standing, holding himself together, breath-stopped in front of a dark liquid, then the man in the red singlet begins to cry, and after him the woman with the blue singlet starts crying too. Are they runners, wanting to reach genuine tiredness after long exertion, the tiredness of the body that silences the tinnitus of death? You will not recognise a man sobbing in his solitariness. First you see the reflection of his face distorted by his tears in the pitch dark of water, then you see how these tears melt his face. No sounds are audible. You are watching the strangled weeping of two people each the shadow of the other, a man and a woman exchanging roles, each entering the black mirror only to leave it the next time round.
Every face is a reversed mask placed on water. The nose and the mouth are open but no one can breathe easily. Gasped-out, trapped sighs are blown into the water: we can see bubbles but can’t hear the bubbling, and the gap between water and air is as narrow as that between life and death, a barrier of two centimetres. We will always see someone crying, standing surrendering themselves before water.
•
(The Jump)
We saw him in the distance, naked. When he came close to us we found that he’d dressed on the way. How that happened when the land is so open we don’t know. A man unknown to us, he has remained here, whereas his physical movements were taking place in parallel times. He stood for a long while at the edge of the water without throwing himself in; he remained standing there lowering his head and closing his eyes. But when he did jump his leap was incomplete. He stayed held in mid-air as if transformed into an image of a world suspended above water, whereas ripplings were wrinkling its surface. This water on the earth, inside a square stone frame, is not a mirror; but a painting more ancient than us.
At this moment, the man is suspended in mid-air like a diver or a foetus, his body a ball, and nothing is holding him in place; around him small leaves and fruits are dropping from the beaks of birds that are flying above him, though we cannot see them. Maybe a sparrow is feeding its young a large butterfly whose wings are crumbling in its beak and the dust of the wings settles on the water’s face and wrinkles slightly there.
Slow down. Had you looked longer you would see. Above the water it was night with a half moon and just a few stars, but high high up the air still had the light of day. Immeasurable time had passed through this stillness, before a weeping willow covered a man who tried to jump. Was he thinking to swim, or of death? We don’t know. We don’t know the depth of anything we see. In this quiet rustling, if you come upon thick leaves and branches that touch the water, try to look for the openings: there’s someone we don’t see, like this man who tried to jump; like a hand stretched out to a drowning man, his shadow trembling over the face of the water, and little by little it entirely vanished. What remained were the soil, the water and the trees.
•
(Meandering Ones)
They take off their phosphor helmets and their coarse gloves, and lean their backs against the rocks in the evening. They’ve tied the chains back on the cranes, and with animal shears they cut the ropes of the hanged, leaving a woman alone, praying at the edge of water, her arms folded and her hair white.
Everyone realized that speech was unnecessary. The rescue crew and construction workers are on stage and their theatre’s in front of ancient trees beneath a cloudy sky, but the crowd becomes bored and ambles on, thinking that nothing’s happening here.
We travel to look back. We travel and we look back and we still see the quiet file that has been moving slow
ly through the forest behind us since dawn. Are those the same people who go back and forth rehearsing the same scene? Are we hypnotized by repetition? It’s daytime now and you gently pass your fingers over the forehead of the sleeping woman kissing her as if consoling someone who is dying, your slow motion all tenderness.
You knock a long time on the door of a dying man you left alone a short while ago, lying on his old marriage bed. You are listening out for his breath but you hear nothing. You keep listening until it’s your own breath you hear and it’s death knocking on the door of your heart; and if the door is opened you will not see the waxen face or toothless jaw. Someone has locked the door and thrown the key in the great water and left. A cab that had been waiting for him in front of the entry stairs took him away.
The Great Flight Page 7